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Surely more than enough has been said and written about the misadventures of Adobe PR back in November, yet there is still one unresolved pain point that has not been addressed – where is Shantanu Narayen in this whole story?

Throughout Adobe’s restructuring and announcements around its new focus, the one person missing in action has been its CEO. In fact, so conspicuously absent, that just about the only related public statement we have seen from him since is a single blog post (conveniently closed for comments) where he not even acknowledges the disruption caused to the community.

Its obvious though Adobe is scrambling to get the right messaging across, unfortunately though for a lot of us the damage has been done and we’re left to pick up the pieces. Many long time Adobe employees are now either laid off or in the firing line of a largely disgruntled user community.

Disgruntled, not because of Adobe’s plans, but their public messaging and clear lack of leadership. There are a great many Flash Platform developers both on desktop with the Flash Player and mobile through AIR who’s primary occupation now is convincing clients about the viability of their technology rather than doing actual coding.

For all intents and purposes Flash is alive and kicking, though admittedly its scope and use cases will change over time as web standards mature and allow us to reach as wide an audience. AIR development on desktop and mobile remains a compelling cross platform solution for rapid application development.

Fast-forward to today, for several days people were asked to submit questions on Twitter using the hashtag #askShantanu to be answered during the keynote of the Adobe Digital Marketing Summit by the CEO himself. The hashtag in question makes for good reading material, as does the distinct lack of actual questions submitted. Another sign of increasing apathy around everything Adobe?

“with respect, do you feel you’ve taken enough personal responsibility around the massive communication failure in November? #askShantanu”

So I’ll ask it here again, along with a call to action – if you think this question deserves an answer, I’d like you to post the following to whatever blog or social network you’re active on:

“Shantanu, where are you? #Adobe”

It is in my opinion time for Adobe as a company to clean up its mess and move on, but to do so it needs to come to terms with the present situation and acknowledge its failures. If nothing else, I expect from a CEO to be willing to step up and defend his position.

Surely more than enough has been said and written about the misadventures of Adobe PR back in November, yet there is still one unresolved pain point that has not been addressed – where is Shantanu Narayen in this whole story?

Throughout Adobe’s restructuring and announcements around its new focus, the one person missing in action has been its CEO. In fact, so conspicuously absent, that just about the only related public statement we have seen from him since is a single blog post (conveniently closed for comments) where he not even acknowledges the disruption caused to the community.

Its obvious though Adobe is scrambling to get the right messaging across, unfortunately though for a lot of us the damage has been done and we’re left to pick up the pieces. Many long time Adobe employees are now either laid off or in the firing line of a largely disgruntled user community.

Disgruntled, not because of Adobe’s plans, but their public messaging and clear lack of leadership. There are a great many Flash Platform developers both on desktop with the Flash Player and mobile through AIR who’s primary occupation now is convincing clients about the viability of their technology rather than doing actual coding.

For all intents and purposes Flash is alive and kicking, though admittedly its scope and use cases will change over time as web standards mature and allow us to reach as wide an audience. AIR development on desktop and mobile remains a compelling cross platform solution for rapid application development.

Fast-forward to today, for several days people were asked to submit questions on Twitter using the hashtag #askShantanu to be answered during the keynote of the Adobe Digital Marketing Summit by the CEO himself. The hashtag in question makes for good reading material, as does the distinct lack of actual questions submitted. Another sign of increasing apathy around everything Adobe?

“with respect, do you feel you’ve taken enough personal responsibility around the massive communication failure in November? #askShantanu”

So I’ll ask it here again, along with a call to action – if you think this question deserves an answer, I’d like you to post the following to whatever blog or social network you’re active on:

“Shantanu, where are you? #Adobe”

It is in my opinion time for Adobe as a company to clean up its mess and move on, but to do so it needs to come to terms with the present situation and acknowledge its failures. If nothing else, I expect from a CEO to be willing to step up and defend his position.

I’m happy to report the Apache Flex incubator proposal vote has concluded today and it has unanimously been accepted as a podling! There were a total of 23 votes of which 10 were binding (by Incubator PMC members). It was nice to see there were no 0 or -1 votes at all so think any initial doubts in the discussion period have been able to get addressed to everyone’s satisfaction.

The next step is getting the infrastructure set up for the project and then ultimately getting the initial code submitted. It is important to realize that now the hard work actually just starts and I look forward to seeing Flex move to an open development model and the community actively getting involved.

With just a few days left of 2011, no better time than now to look back and get some perspective on what happened this last year and where things are going.

There’s been quite a few changes for me personally, one of which was the distinct lack of speaking engagements I took on this year. It turns out that I only presented at FFK “Beyond Tellerrand” – though if you had to pick one conference to participate in, that one would be very high on anyone’s list.

Our “HTML5 Solutions” book got published with Friends of ED / Apress and has been receiving excellent reviews, here again I’ve been very fortunate in being able to work with talented co-authors I can consider good friends.

A new job opportunity

By some bizarre coincidence I ended up being in London end of April when the royal wedding was taking place. Less than a handful of people knew what I was up to over there – no, I wasn’t indulging my crush on Kate Middleton or plotting to overthrow the royal family – it was my onsite interview at Google. What I thought might very well turn into a “crash-and-burn scenario” went great and yesterday was in fact my six month Googleversary. Having the opportunity to work at a company like Google is a great catalyst for being productive – yes, there are great perks – but most of all its your talented colleagues and the projects you see coming out practically on a daily basis that give you the drive to do well.

I moved to London in June, now live in Lambeth on the South Bank with a postcard view of the Houses of Parliament across the river outside my apartment block. In all likelihood I will be moving in early 2012 to cut down on my rent and have a slightly easier commute to the new office at Central St Giles in the West End.

End of September I was given the opportunity to work for a week from the fantastic Google campus in Mountain View and meet my US colleagues there before heading to the Adobe MAX conference in Los Angeles. I also worked from the San Francisco office for a couple of days, which has the most amazing views of the Bay Bridge you can imagine.

Adobe messing up and the road to recovery

The Adobe MAX conference was interesting, though in many respects somewhat underwhelming – not in the least because there was no hardware giveaway as most of us were hoping🙂 The conference is always a good time to meet up with old friends though and the community leader summit was a definite highlight for me, Rachel and the team did an outstanding job!

What annoyed me most looking back is how careless Adobe has been in communicating its Flash Platform roadmap – thousands of people paid a significant amount of money in good trust to attend the flagship conference and learn about Adobe’s plans and subsequently invest in their technology strategy for at least the year to come. When you decide to completely overhaul your approach less than a month later you simply do not respect your most loyal customers and community.

Obviously mistakes were made repeatedly and PR and communication at Adobe are in a very sorry state – evidenced by the 9/11 (or 11/9 if you’re in the US) press release where 750 layoffs are glossed over in the paragraph above announcing another record quarter for revenue. Some of the talented and passionate people that left the company this year include: Doug Winnie, Richard Galvan, John Koch, Duane Nickull,…

I do want to make it clear that while I have been quite harsh and outspoken about Adobe as a company and the lousy way it has handled their restructuring and new product focus – I did not aim to target my outrage at any Adobe employees individually. I think especially the community-facing teams deserve our appreciation for how well they dealt with a very difficult situation.

What’s coming up next year

This coming January I’ll be speaking at gotoAndSki() in Switzerland about easy P2P networking with the Flash Platform. Most of my talk will be based on the CocoonP2P library I started and with the help of the Dirk Eismann evolved in something incredibly nice. I’m working on adding in a few new features that I’ll hopefully be able to demo at the conference.

I would really like to pick up podcasting again, but will start small. The current thinking is to host a monthly news round up and find some guests to talk about their latest projects.

I’ve had a bit of exposure to Google App Engine at work and would like to explore that more and possibly do a couple of experiments. The same goes for Dart which seems like a very promising language and the perfect middle ground between traditional Javascript and the more object-oriented ActionScript 3.0 style programming I’m used to.

There are a couple of HTML5 book proposals that came my way – I doubt I’ll find the time to work on it so will probably decline. I am considering self-publishing something this year without a strict deadline, the idea being of writing it in the open to get peer review and feedback as I work my way through it. I’ll also be giving NaNoWriMo another go (probably not in November though) – my first attempt this year at writing a novel in a month was an epic fail, only reaching 10.000 words of the required 50.000 minimum.

I’d like to end by wishing everyone the very best in 2012 and thank you for the year that was and the role you played in it!

With just a few days left of 2011, no better time than now to look back and get some perspective on what happened this last year and where things are going.

There’s been quite a few changes for me personally, one of which was the distinct lack of speaking engagements I took on this year. It turns out that I only presented at FFK “Beyond Tellerrand” – though if you had to pick one conference to participate in, that one would be very high on anyone’s list.

Our “HTML5 Solutions” book got published with Friends of ED / Apress and has been receiving excellent reviews, here again I’ve been very fortunate in being able to work with talented co-authors I can consider good friends.

A new job opportunity

By some bizarre coincidence I ended up being in London end of April when the royal wedding was taking place. Less than a handful of people knew what I was up to over there – no, I wasn’t indulging my crush on Kate Middleton or plotting to overthrow the royal family – it was my onsite interview at Google. What I thought might very well turn into a “crash-and-burn scenario” went great and yesterday was in fact my six month Googleversary. Having the opportunity to work at a company like Google is a great catalyst for being productive – yes, there are great perks – but most of all its your talented colleagues and the projects you see coming out practically on a daily basis that give you the drive to do well.

I moved to London in June, now live in Lambeth on the South Bank with a postcard view of the Houses of Parliament across the river outside my apartment block. In all likelihood I will be moving in early 2012 to cut down on my rent and have a slightly easier commute to the new office at Central St Giles in the West End.

End of September I was given the opportunity to work for a week from the fantastic Google campus in Mountain View and meet my US colleagues there before heading to the Adobe MAX conference in Los Angeles. I also worked from the San Francisco office for a couple of days, which has the most amazing views of the Bay Bridge you can imagine.

Adobe messing up and the road to recovery

The Adobe MAX conference was interesting, though in many respects somewhat underwhelming – not in the least because there was no hardware giveaway as most of us were hoping🙂 The conference is always a good time to meet up with old friends though and the community leader summit was a definite highlight for me, Rachel and the team did an outstanding job!

What annoyed me most looking back is how careless Adobe has been in communicating its Flash Platform roadmap – thousands of people paid a significant amount of money in good trust to attend the flagship conference and learn about Adobe’s plans and subsequently invest in their technology strategy for at least the year to come. When you decide to completely overhaul your approach less than a month later you simply do not respect your most loyal customers and community.

Obviously mistakes were made repeatedly and PR and communication at Adobe are in a very sorry state – evidenced by the 9/11 (or 11/9 if you’re in the US) press release where 750 layoffs are glossed over in the paragraph above announcing another record quarter for revenue. Some of the talented and passionate people that left the company this year include: Doug Winnie, Richard Galvan, John Koch, Duane Nickull,…

I do want to make it clear that while I have been quite harsh and outspoken about Adobe as a company and the lousy way it has handled their restructuring and new product focus – I did not aim to target my outrage at any Adobe employees individually. I think especially the community-facing teams deserve our appreciation for how well they dealt with a very difficult situation.

What’s coming up next year

This coming January I’ll be speaking at gotoAndSki() in Switzerland about easy P2P networking with the Flash Platform. Most of my talk will be based on the CocoonP2P library I started and with the help of the Dirk Eismann evolved in something incredibly nice. I’m working on adding in a few new features that I’ll hopefully be able to demo at the conference.

I would really like to pick up podcasting again, but will start small. The current thinking is to host a monthly news round up and find some guests to talk about their latest projects.

I’ve had a bit of exposure to Google App Engine at work and would like to explore that more and possibly do a couple of experiments. The same goes for Dart which seems like a very promising language and the perfect middle ground between traditional Javascript and the more object-oriented ActionScript 3.0 style programming I’m used to.

There are a couple of HTML5 book proposals that came my way – I doubt I’ll find the time to work on it so will probably decline. I am considering self-publishing something this year without a strict deadline, the idea being of writing it in the open to get peer review and feedback as I work my way through it. I’ll also be giving NaNoWriMo another go (probably not in November though) – my first attempt this year at writing a novel in a month was an epic fail, only reaching 10.000 words of the required 50.000 minimum.

I’d like to end by wishing everyone the very best in 2012 and thank you for the year that was and the role you played in it!

The vote on the Apache Flex incubator proposal is now open and in 72 hours we will know the result. The vote on adding the additional mentors to the Apache Incubator PMC has not concluded but they have provisionally been added to the proposal.

In the unlikely event Dave Fisher and/or Anne Kathrine Petterøe are not accepted there are still at least two confirmed initial mentors on the project.

You can follow along on the mailinglist and show your support with a +1 (though your vote will only be binding if you are a PMC member). There is already quite a bit of activity on the thread and it is extremely likely we will have the go-ahead this Friday for the Apache Flex podling.

The vote on the Apache Flex incubator proposal is now open and in 72 hours we will know the result. The vote on adding the additional mentors to the Apache Incubator PMC has not concluded but they have provisionally been added to the proposal.

In the unlikely event Dave Fisher and/or Anne Kathrine Petterøe are not accepted there are still at least two confirmed initial mentors on the project.

You can follow along on the mailinglist and show your support with a +1 (though your vote will only be binding if you are a PMC member). There is already quite a bit of activity on the thread and it is extremely likely we will have the go-ahead this Friday for the Apache Flex podling.